Well it was more the store was full of teenagers and kids generally fucking around while their parents browsed. Plenty of those parents were getting attended to by staff - even if they had bookings, it takes a spare staff member (of which there were many just milling around) one minute to ask me what I'm here for and recommend I make a booking if I had a complex request.

The conversation literally would have been "can I help you?" "Yes I want a space grey m3 macbook air, 16gb ram 512gb ssd, I will pay for it right now and then leave this terrible place tyvm". With the laptop on-hand the purchasing process would've taken as little time as it took for them to ram it into pos and for my phone nfc to pay.

Out of interest how long ago was this? The Covent Garden and Oxford street ones literally have a queue line for pickups and purchases over in the far right. Not 100% sure how long Oxford street has had theirs (at least since Xmas) but I know for a fact it's existed at Covent Garden's since day one as I used to work there.

I'm trying to get better at replying to my internet friendos!

It was last year, 2024, in the year of our lord ChatGPT.

Oh, I certainly had a good look around in the 20-30 minutes I was waiting for attention. But I couldn't find anything like what you describe, nor staff to interact with me to at least get directed to the right place (which would take 10 seconds).

I mean I'm not saying it's a _bad_ shop. I'm just saying it's not always the angelic, golden, sterile, etc experience that many claim.